Intel's redesigned mobile chip will do a better job managing power consumption, and promises up to eight hours of notebook battery life. Laptops today typically last about two hours on one battery.

Banias notebooks will come with 802.11a and 802.11b wireless connectivity built in. When users disconnect from a wired network, Banias will automatically switch to a wireless hook-up.

But while Intel (INTC) hyped the new chip's battery life and wireless compatibility at this week's developer conference in San Jose, it was tight-lipped about speed. Analysts have cited speeds from 1.3GHz to 1.7GHz – slower than the 2.2GHz Pentium IV-M mobile chips Intel will introduce shortly.

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Two for one: On the desktop side, Intel officials touted a new technology called "hyper-threading," which lets a single CPU act as two – so two processes can operate in parallel. Intel promises a 25 percent improvement on application performance over a processor of the same clock speed.

The good news for developers is they don't have to rewrite applications to take advantage of the increased computing power. Hyper-threading shows the most promise for multitasking, especially for input/output-heavy applications. (PC users who have tried working in a file or browsing the Web with an antivirus program running can understand the benefits. Antivirus programs can hobble even a fast machine with loads of memory.)

Intel will introduce hyper-threading with its Pentium IV 3GHz chips, set to ship in the fourth quarter.

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LaGrande old time: Intel previewed LaGrande, a hardware-level security system that could work with Microsoft's Palladium – the code name for the software giant's Trustworthy Computing initiative.

Intel wouldn't reveal much about LaGrande except that it will be a series of CPU and chipset extensions designed to protect information stored on a computer. The data will be moved around between chipsets and memory in such a way that it cannot be compromised, Intel said.

LaGrande is at least two years off.

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Wireless goes retro: Intel has reintroduced the old multimedia extension MMX, which originally applied to Pentium chips in the mid-1990s. The new technology, Wireless MMX, will be included with Intel's XScale wireless chips and should improve video decoding performance by 40 to 60 percent, the company said.

"If anything, this conference is Intel saying, 'Don't forget we're in the communications business,'" said Matthew Godfrey, an analyst with Semico Research, a semiconductor market research firm.

Still, he said, Intel's focus on wireless is a good sign that a battered sector may be ready for a rebound.